Around 1530 on 30 April 1945, in the spacious command bunker under his chancellery in Berlin, Adolf Hitler, styled Führer (leader) of what he had touted as a thousand-year Greater Germany, died by his own hand. The dictator’s mistress and a number of close followers joined him in death. Above the bunker, the old men and boys of the German home guard and a few depleted regular military units still fought the Soviet Red Army in the ruins of Germany’s capital. Hitler’s so-called testament, a diatribe against all those he held responsible for Germany’s defeat, named Grossadmiral Karl Doenitz, the commander in chief of the German Kriegsmarine (navy) as his successor.
The Third Reich’s internal situation in the late spring of 1945 was dire. Despite concerted German attempts at production decentralization and facility dispersal, Allied strategic bombing raids had destroyed most of the country’s industrial infrastructure as well as its major population centers. Refined fuel of any kind was at a premium, grounding most of what remained of the German air force und adversely impacting the mobility of the ground forces. Much of the civilian population was homeless, subsisted on inadequate rations, and could be only marginally accommodated by what remained of the relief services. The influx of refugees fleeing the advance of the Red Army in Germany’s eastern provinces strained this fragile net to the breaking point. In desperation, and clearly sensing that its end was near, the Nazi power structure appeared determined to lash out against as many perceived enemies as possible before its demise. Thousands of still-surviving concentration camp inmates were forced on death marches into the country’s interior or just murdered in place. Numerous political prisoners, many incarcerated since before the war, were executed. Military personnel suspected of malingering or desertion were summarily shot or hanged, as were many civilians who ventured to express dissent or “defeatist” sentiments and forcibly conscripted foreign laborers suspected of being saboteurs.
